Rare Tool Guided Williams Jury: An Instruction Manual

By ROBERT HANLEY

Published: May 16, 2004

At the start of jury deliberations in the Jayson Williams trial last month, the presiding judge, in a relatively rare move in New Jersey, gave the jury a written copy of his oral instructions on the law underlying the eight charges against Mr. Williams. Again and again over the next four days, the jurors relied on the 23-page document for guidance as they waded through the thicket of legal concepts and thresholds at issue.

''We used it a lot,'' the jury foreman, Andrew Clark, said. ''I think it definitely made it easier for us. The definitions definitely helped.'' The jury reached a verdict in 23 hours after a 15-week manslaughter trial.

At first, the judge, Edward M. Coleman of New Jersey Superior Court, provided the jury a single copy of his instructions. Mr. Clark said he had spent an hour or two reading the document to the other jurors and passing it around. Soon, they asked Judge Coleman for individual copies, and he provided them.

Routinely, judges in criminal and civil trials in federal and state courts around the country still read juries their instructions on the law, a process known as a charge. Critics of the tradition consider it a tedious exercise for juries, with judges explaining complex concepts of law in dense language that is not easily understood or retained by jurors.

But under movements over the last 15 years or so to make the charges more comprehensible to juries, judges in federal courts and courts in at least 36 states have the option to give them written copies of their oral charge, according to the National Center for State Courts and Westlaw, a legal research service.

New Jersey's judges have had authority to give juries written instructions since 1982. But the practice is not widespread, said Michael Garrahan, the jury program specialist in the state's administrative office of the courts. ''I think it's becoming a little more commonplace as technology advances,'' he said. Legal instructions for various criminal charges are now uniform statewide and carried on the Internet. Judges can download them and add minor changes dealing with specific issues in a case, Mr. Garrahan said.

Connecticut's judges also have discretion to give written instructions, but the majority of criminal court judges do not do so, said Judge Susan B. Handy, chief administrative judge of the state's criminal court division. Judges adept with computers do so more often, she said.

In New York, civil court judges can give written charges. Officials in the state court system have asked the Legislature to extend the authority to criminal court judges, if a jury requests a written charge. This year, the state bar association's house of delegates, its policy-making body, endorsed the idea of providing criminal court juries written charges.

The jurors in the Williams trial say the written instructions made their deliberations easier and quicker and helped produce the divided verdict against Mr. Williams, 36, a former New Jersey Nets star. He was acquitted on April 30 of the most serious charge against him -- aggravated manslaughter -- in the fatal shooting of a chauffeur, Costas Christofi, and two weapons charges. The jury deadlocked, 8 to 4 for acquittal, on a second manslaughter count. It convicted Mr. Williams of tampering with witnesses and evidence after the shooting, and two relatively minor cover-up charges.

One juror, Shalisha Martin, noted that the instructions explained that conviction on a charge required proof beyond a reasonable doubt. ''If you don't agree with everything, if you have a doubt on one thing, you can't say guilty,'' she said.

Mr. Williams was found not guilty of aggravated manslaughter, which carried a maximum sentence of 30 years, because the jury, in part, rejected the main legal element, or threshold, of the crime, jurors said. That element is that Mr. Williams acted with extreme indifference to human life, or, as Judge Coleman wrote in his instructions, did not care if Mr. Christofi might be killed.

On the second manslaughter charge, the jury squabbled over two definitions in the judge's instructions. The main element of the charge is that Mr. Williams acted recklessly, or was aware of and disregarded risk that his conduct would cause Mr. Christofi's death. The arguing centered on whether Mr. Williams's handling of the gun was reckless, or negligent, jurors said.

Negligence was not mentioned until shortly before deliberations started, when a defense lawyer, Joseph A. Hayden, asked Judge Coleman to include it in his instructions. He did so, over the objections of the prosecutor, Steven C. Lember. Legally, negligence is less serious than recklessness. Judge Coleman's charge defined negligence as Mr. Williams's failure to perceive a ''substantial and unjustifiable risk'' that his conduct would produce a death. The judge wrote that if the jury believed he was negligent, it must acquit him. He also told the jurors to acquit Mr. Williams if they determined that the shooting was an accident.

''We went back and forth over that for over a day,'' Mr. Clark said of the debate about recklessness versus negligence. In the end, eight jurors decided the shooting was either negligent, or accidental because the gun malfunctioned. Four jurors determined it was reckless, Mr. Clark said. He said he was among the four who voted for conviction.

Mr. Lember has not yet disclosed whether he will seek to retry Mr. Williams on the charge of reckless manslaughter, and a court hearing is scheduled for Friday.